Curse of the Lost Souls is a minecraft survival island map played under the rules and conditions of a minecraft adventure island map. In just a couple days (or perhaps right now if you’re reading this in a couple days time) you won’t have to use your self control to impose adventure conditions on yourself – those adventure conditions being not breaking or placing blocks, but simply using the available materials provided by the map itself.

So what makes Curse of the Lost Souls special? It certainly has that ‘x’ factor, which for me means the moment I load the map I am intrigued and invited into the world. The landscape is not only beautiful, but staged in a way a REMAX agent could be proud of. When you step ashore into a Tiki bar gone awfully silent and deserted you feel as if the adventure is just beginning, and indeed it is.

What makes Curse of the Lost Souls a little tedious? ‘Adventure’ mode in this map basically means ‘find the chests and read the notes in the file’, which is fine if you like reading notes and looking for chests, but it means that you’re probably going to break the rules at some point and I don’t know, perhaps punch a tree for the hell of it. Don’t feel guilty if you find yourself, I don’t know, crafting a workbench and building a purple sheep farm. You gotta get whimsical with it.

A small island minecraft survival map, Edge of the World uses many of the basic staples of the minectaft survival genre and puts them in a very small sea. There are several challenges in this map, circumnavigating the ocean being one of them. But the real challenge comes from the nature of the map itself. Animals don’t spawn here, so survival depends on the sea. Fishing is your best chance of keeping yourself nourished before you manage to build a farm. Which brings me to the second set of natural challenges in this minecraft survival island map – the soul sand. Most of the island is made of soul sand, so you have to retrieve dirt from the innards of the map and bring it up to the surface where it can be useful.

This is a simple minecraft map that relies on the mechanics of the game and limited resources to make things interesting. Though it might not be the longest survival map you ever play, taming the wild soul sands and subduing them to the useful and the good will be quite a challenge – and with the scope of the map being small, you’ll really be able to stamp your individual mark on the terrain, which is half the fun of survival island style maps.

A fun survival map with not one, but two innovative goals, this survival island style minecraft map requires you to first rejuvenate the barren dirt and sand landscape and then to populate it by building a village and breeding sufficient villagers that the island runneth over with life.

This map doesn’t have a bunch of superfluous silly ‘achievements’ or ‘challenges’ or whatever we’re calling them these days.* It has two painfully slow long term goals which is quite reminiscent of real life, where doing anything worthwhile takes at least a decade – and only at the end of that decade does one realize it was all sort of a waste of time.

There are no naturally spawning animals at first – or ever, because this void island is technically an ‘ocean’ biome and there are no ores to mine either. The ores are hidden in a hole somewhere and you’ll find them eventually after a sufficient amount of smashing the ground with your face.

A single mountain towering to a sharp peak is the setting for this minecraft survival map. You spawn in a small boat just off the shore of the mountainous island with no supplies save a single tree and the bones of your less fortunate crewmen, which will certainly come in handy as fertilizer on your upcoming adventure.

But you are not alone on the high seas, there are several other ships. Not ships that will offer any hope of rescue however, these are the legendary monster ridden ships of yore. Each ship contains a different hoard of blood thirsty monsters who must be slain if you wish to capture their supplies.

Though this is a simple map at heart, it has all the ingredients of a fun survival experience, challenging terrain, limited resources, the impending doom of outside threats and of course, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are also additional challenges, like building cactus farms and going fishing and all that sort of thing.

Oh, and there’s more than one surprise waiting in this map, so don’t be too quick to judge a book by its cover. It may appear to be simple, but your expectations could very well be subverted in this cone of rock and dirt which turns out to have, without being too spoilerish about it – Tardis like qualities. You have been warned.

Nuked is a narrative survival map, meaning that the first map you download is but chapter one in a series of daring escapes. In this first installment you wake up in quite a neat little bunker in the middle of a small and barren archipelogo of sand and smoothstone islands. The rest of the world has been nuked and instead of just staying on your island, where the radiation has apparently not reached, you’ve decided to get to the End and kill a dragon, because you seek danger like a lemming seeks cliffs.

Before you start thinking this is going to be easy, you should be warned that all the ores in this map have been hand placed, which means striking it rich is a matter of persistence and eating a lot of dry bread. And perhaps a little melon if you can get a patch up and running. They should really just call this Vegan Survival Island.

My only complaint is that you spawn in a bunker, which means shelter, which means you could ‘technically’ win this map just by staring at a wall. You wouldn’t have completed the challenges of course, but challenges are for people who like artificial constructs.